I’ve been doing some work on my academia.edu profile this morning. There are now selections of work based on the research available for you to download. Perhaps most usefully, there is a poster aimed at general audiences, with an easy-read version. That was presented at the Living on the Edge user-led conference on disability and the churches, held at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in 2015. There are also powerpoint slides from a couple of talks I’ve given – including a recent one from a biblical studies conference, which gives an insight into some of the results of my research as I’m writing it up. There are also papers and abstracts from talks/panels not directly based on my research – but they’re about disability in society, and you might find them interesting.

Enjoy! And I’d love it if you’d point me to your websites or pages where you’re exploring your perspectives on disability and the churches, or disability and society in general. I’m happy to share the links.

On twitter, the tag #fullaccesschurch is gaining support among disabled Christians calling for access to the churches. It was created by the user-led group Disability and Jesus, who have encouraged disabled people to use it when tweeting about access difficulties they face at church. It was the official hashtag of the excellent Towards a Theology of Disability conference, also a user-led event, in the summer of 2016.

The concept of ‘access’ may suggest the built environment, to some people. And while that’s an important part of disability access, it’s not the whole story. In the twitter conversation above, for example, a user of the hashtag tells me that there is poor access in churches for autistic people. The #fullaccesschurch tag has been used to talk about access to churches for people with mental health problems, people with sensory impairments, those with learning difficulties, and disabled children… The emerging interpretation of the concept of ‘full access’ to churches, across the disabled Christian community, is very broad.

Disability studies, too, talks about access in diverse ways: there is a focus on access to the built environment, but there’s also research on access to leisure, access to transport, access to education, and more. The definition of access there is often unclear, though. Accessibility is “a slippery notion… one of those common terms which everyone uses until faced with the problem of defining and measuring it” (Gould, 1969:64). Sometimes research draws on legal definitions of disability access, or practical access criteria for building codes or town planning. On the whole, though, disability studies research avoids the term altogether, presumably because of its lack of clarity. However, I am using the term in my research — because it’s being used by the community, and that matters in the kind of research that I’m doing.

I’m now writing a chapter on the stories of four of my participants. I began by thinking about these as stories of inclusion (to churches) and exclusion (from them). In writing the chapter, though, I have realised that the concept of ‘inclusion’ is a problematic one. It began as a positive concept, involving “the creation of settings in which difference is encouraged and valued” (Cameron, 2014:79). Instead, though, Cameron says that even in settings claiming to be inclusive, in practice “disabled people are still more likely to be met with patronising tolerance than with respectful acknowledgement as equals” (2014:80). Equality, he suggests here, where institutions — like churches? — fall short. Equality, I will argue in my chapter, is the goal behind the idea of a ‘full access church’. I will argue that such equality requires transformation.

In a previous chapter of my thesis, on mainstream disability theology (which is often not written by disabled people), I’ve talked about how this theology often focuses on welcome. Welcoming disabled people into our churches, argue many theologians, is what is needed. Inclusion, in short.

But when churches bring disabled people into their environment, when they try to include them in to their space, are they really changing what they do to accommodate others’ differences? Are churches looking at their practices and asking how far those practices exclude people, and how they could really challenge themselves on this? Are they asking what their environments communicate about who is welcome, and what their practices quietly reveal to people about their own value? Are they considering what they are saying to their blind members when they have not made their websites accessible to them? Are they asking what messages are communicated when the main church building is accessible to wheelchair users but the altar is not? On the whole, ideas of inclusion, of welcome, tend to focus on bringing people into spaces that already exist, rather than on changing institutions to make room for difference. Instead, transforming churches, in terms of their spaces, practices and culture, may be one way forward towards full access for all disabled people to all churches. More than simply asserting that the gospel is for all, a transformation of churches would make the gospel truly accessible to all.

Real transformation would require churches working in collaboration with the disabled Christians who are the experts on their own needs. The stories featured in my chapter include examples of people who tried to encourage their churches to transform their spaces, practices or cultures, but did not find that church communities were willing to do this.

This kind of transformation is compared with conditional ‘welcome’ by the disability theologian James Metzger, in his challenging response to the Parable of the Banquet, which is so often quoted by as a reason to encourage disabled people to come into churches. In the parable, from Luke 14, Jesus tells the story of a man who was preparing a great banquet, but whose invitations were all rejected by people with flimsy excuses:

“The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’

“‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.’

“Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.I tell you, not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.’”

Metzger boldly turns the most common interpretation of this parable upside-down. If this man represents God, he argues, then this is a very ambivalent portrait of God and his reasons for ‘welcoming’ people, or not, into his kingdom. If you are a Christian, you might be offended by Metzger’s conclusions — he thinks that “The disabled cannot trust and likely would not wish to cultivate relations with the ableist, capricious, paternalistic God who surfaces in this parable” (2011:23.10). He observes that here, in being compelled to come in to suit the whims of the host, “the poor and disabled are stripped of agency and autonomy, an experience not unfamiliar to them” (2011:23.6). This experience is not unfamiliar to the people whose stories are featured in my chapter, either, some of whom spoke about having their needs ignored and their expertise invalidated in their churches. “Compel them to come in,” says the ending to this parable, an ending that is not always quoted. Does this call for a transformation, a dismantling of the church structures that exclude, so that all can worship? Or is it a conditional welcome, based on being able to survive in a church environment designed for the ‘mainstream’?

Metzger does not end on this depressing note. He says that the parables can still be seen positively by disabled people, perhaps as representing a Jesus who acknowledges the difficulties that ordinary people will have with God, “encouraging them to remain in conversation with God” (2009:75). Perhaps looking at the Bible through different lenses, seeing the possibility that disablism and exclusion are sometimes present there — and in other sources that churches use for their approaches to disability — could help churches in moving from shaky principles of inclusion to real transformation and full access. Not all Christians will agree, and that’s good. Another feature of the stories in my research is the diversity of theology and Christian perspectives that people hold, influencing their views on disability, and shaping their ideas on how churches can create access for all. (Glimpses of that can be seen in this chapter, although later chapters will consider diverse theologies in more depth.) But a critical approach to such concepts as ‘welcome,’ ‘inclusion’ and ‘access’ is important when looking at stories where people have felt excluded from, and included in, churches. This chapter of my thesis will consider the circumstances that create a sense of exclusion or access for disabled people in churches, and whether anything might be learned from the ways in which these participants’ access to churches is either impeded or enabled.

The stories in the chapter that I’m writing now reveal diverse experiences of access, exclusion and church transformation. They include the experiences of a woman with ME/CFSwho has difficulties accessing activities when they are held at times of day that are difficult for her; a couple who are blind and are struggling in a church where their needs are often forgotten; a wheelchair user who cannot access large parts of the cathedral she attends. These stories are also not just about physical access. They show that the culture of a church can exclude people, as with the blind couple who cannot take part fully in social activities because of the ways in which their church organises them. They show that church spaces can shape church practice, as with the wheelchair user who does not have access to the high altar at her church.They show that disabled people’s experience of church can be transformed by small changes in culture, as with the woman who felt acknowledged and accepted through a mention in the church notice sheet that people were welcome to sit through the service if they needed to. These transformations of ‘the way things are done’ in church, whether small and simple or larger and more complex, can help people to feel that their bodies and minds can play a full part in that church community, different from the socially constructed norm though they may be.

There were many more stories of participants that I could have represented in this chapter too, other stories about different kinds of access, including those of my several autistic participants and people with mental health problems. (Their stories will absolutely be represented in future chapters: it’s just that they’re going to fit better in, for example, the chapter on church cultures and how they specifically exclude some disabled people with particular needs.) But these four stories give a glimpse of some of the ways in which a transformational theology and practice of access in the churches, rather than a passive theology of welcome, might help to create conditions in which people are fully and practically included. In which they are enabled to worship and be part of community, all their needs met, as much as non-disabled people’s needs are met in churches. In which disabled people might truly find a ‘full access church’.

I look forward to sharing the chapter with you, when my thesis is finally written and published.

Why research what the Bible says about disability? Isn’t it irrelevant to society by now? Aren’t there more important things to research? Why bother?

My research does not come from a specifically Christian perspective. I hope to be working with a partnership group of disabled Christians, and I expect (and hope) that their Christian ‘take’ on things will come through the research. But my views on Christianity, specifically the Bible, are sociological. I’m interested in the effects that religion has on society, and vice versa. And, perhaps most importantly to me, I’m interested in how the Bible has affected society – especially its effects on disabled people.

Disabled people have asked me why this interests me. The subtext to their question is an important one: in these days of ‘welfare reform’ and the appalling removal of rights from disabled people in this country, are there not more important things to research? In many ways, there are (and if I’d started my PhD after the election of the coalition government, I might have ended up researching something different). And yet, I continue to believe in the serious importance of the Bible to disabled people. The Bible and Christianity are absolutely central to the way that our society views disability. Christian and biblically-influenced views have shaped the models that we use to understand disability, especially the charity and tragedy models of disability, over centuries. There are lots of examples of research on this.Lois Bragg sees a much more positive view of disability in pre-Christian texts, such as Norse and Celtic pagan literature, than she does in later Christian society and the Bible. Scholars like Jeremy Schipper and Rebecca Raphael have explored the ways that disability is represented in specific biblical texts, especially in the Old Testament – for example, the rules that did not allow disabled priests to enter the central area of the Temple, which was the only place where a direct experience of God was possible, and how these rules changed and broadened across different books of the Bible. Cusack argues that there were two contradictory ways that disabled people were seen in medieval society, under the influence of different, competing biblical approaches to disability: as either blessed or demonized. From these approaches grew the charity and tragedy models of disability, which were strongly influenced by Christian perspectives not only towards charity in general, but specifically by biblical models of healing (something I’m very interested in – but that’s another blog post).

This major influence of the Bible on social responses to disability isn’t widely acknowledged, though. Disability studies texts mention the Bible in passing, especially referencing the Old Testament laws that I mentioned above, but focus in more detail on the effects of the paradoxical biblical representations for medieval and later societies. This is important, but I think it’s even more important to start with the representations of disability in the Bible itself, since these are complex and paradoxical – as you might expect, in a collection of writing that spans thousands of years.

Hector Avalos says there are three ways in which disability-focused biblical scholars respond to the Bible: redemptionism, rejectionism or historicism.* (I can’t link to his article as it isn’t available online, but if you’re interested in disability and you ever get the chance to read it, do – it’s fantastic.) Historicism simply involves historical analysis of the way disability is treated in ancient texts and what this reveals about how the ancient world thought about it. But the other two perspectives interest me more. If you’re redemptionist about the biblical texts that represent disability, you want to reclaim them, perhaps by showing that Jesus challenged the stigma and discrimination that faced disabled people in the ancient world (although it’s not clear whether or not he actually did). This is the kind of reclaiming that feminist biblical scholars have done with the less positive representations of women in the Bible. Rejectionists, on the other hand, tend to argue that nothing positive can be done with the representations of disability in the Bible, and that it is better to expose these texts and challenge the effect that they have had on society than to pretend that everything the Bible says about disability is good. My perspective, as you can probably tell by now, is somewhere between the two.

To illustrate my position on this, let me (re-)tell you a story from the Bible, and say something about how it is used. The Gospel of Luke shows Jesus telling this story while he is at the home of a Pharisee (religious leader). A man is preparing a great banquet and invites some rich, powerful guests. He sends his servant out to distribute the invitations. Each of the guests gives an excuse as to why they can’t come. The servants comes back to report this to his master, who becomes incredibly angry. He says to his servant, “Go out into the streets and find the lowest of the low in our society – poor people and disabled people**. Get them to come to the banquet.” The servant does this, but has to return to report that there is still room for more guests. “Then go out to very edges of town and into the country lanes, and make the beggars come in,” says the master. He adds that, if he has his way, none of the people who were invited to the party will ever get a taste of his food or drink.

This story is so widely used to illustrate the inclusiveness of God’s kingdom that I’ve lost count of the Christian disability organisations that quote it in this context. James Metzger argues that this parable is not about disability or the inclusiveness of God – and that if you try to read it this way, you tie yourself up in knots. The master has clearly not had any kind of change of heart towards the poor or oppressed in his society, nor is he any less obsessed with social status at the end than he is at the beginning. Metzger sees this story as reflecting a very ambivalent view towards disabled people on the part of Jesus, the storyteller. But, as disabled people know, we have been used as literary devices and metaphors in stories, rather than as real people, for as far back as we can remember. I think that this story is just using disability as one more literary device, to say something that probably isn’t about disability at all. The Bible isn’t representing disabled people any more negatively here than any other text does. It’s just that, when it does represent disability, it has more influence over society than other books. The representations of disabled people in the Bible will be remembered when representations in other books have been long forgotten. And that, for me, is why the Bible matters – to all disabled people. Of course, it matters a great deal to disabled Christians, and it’s their views that I’m particularly interested in, in this research project. But I think it has a great deal of relevance to the rest of society too, when it comes to disability.

Philip Davies has written, in his book ‘Whose Bible Is It Anyway?’, that the extensive role and influence of the Bible in society means that people outside of Christian (and Jewish) communities have the right to critique the Bible too. (He says a lot more than this, of course – it’s a very interesting book. I’m going to a lecture that he’s giving this evening, which is one of the things that sparked this blog post.) In Disability Studies, I think that we need to be looking a lot more closely at the Bible and its role in the ways that we are represented. Because, on the whole, the Bible has represented disability without the input of disabled people. As with most forms of literature, we tend to be reduced to narrative (and theological) devices by the Bible, but this doesn’t have to be a problem as long as it’s acknowledged and talked about. For that, we need the input of disabled people. Including, but not limited to, disabled Christians.

**I’m paraphrasing, because I dislike the language used about both groups (poor people and disabled people) in most translations of the Bible, where we are reduced to ‘the’ (as in, ‘the poor’, ‘the lame’, ‘the blind’).

Image of a Bible open at a page of the gospels. Photo by Rachel Davies (cc).

Image of a Bible open at a page of the gospels. Photo (cc) Rachel Davies.

I did give the warning that ‘regular’ for me actually means ‘biannual’, didn’t I? Apologies for the long absence. We moved house, so life took over for quite a while. But! I am now enrolled on my PhD (although not ‘registered’ until I’ve submitted an extended proposal, which I’ll be doing after Christmas). Continue Reading